Deeplinks Blog posts about Digital Books

We’ve been puzzling over the Author’s Guild’s decision to sue several university libraries for participating in the digitization and storage of millions of works (largely in connection with the Google Books project) and making scans of some of those works available to the academic community. Simply put, it appears that the Guild is dead set on wasting time and money addressing imaginary harms, whether or not its efforts might actually benefit either its members or the public.

California took another big step towards updating reader privacy today. The State Senate unanimously passed SB602, the Reader Privacy Act, which would bring book privacy law into the digital age. The bill prevents the disclosure of information about readers from booksellers without a warrant in a criminal case or a court order in a civil case, and also requires booksellers to report the number and type of requests that they receive so that we can track government demands for reader information.

California has taken another big step towards updating reader privacy for the digital age. The State Senate Judiciary Committee passed through SB 602, the Reader Privacy Act, after hearing testimony from EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn and others in support of the bill Tuesday.

As Cindy told the judiciary committee, the books we choose to read reveal private information about our political and religious beliefs or interests, our health concerns, our financial situation, and our personal and professional lives. Maintaining reader privacy is fundamental to the dignity of Californians, and this principle is well ensconced in state law. However, with the market for digital books exploding, the law needs an update for the 21st Century.

Yesterday’s decision rejecting the proposed settlement in the Google Books case, Authors Guild v. Google, got a number of things right. For starters, as we wrote shortly after the decision was announced, we’re glad that the court acknowledged the importance of the privacy concerns we helped to raise.

With respect to the class action analysis, the court correctly concluded that the settlement did not take account of the interests of all of the class members, such as academic authors. As UC Berkeley law professor (and EFF board member) Pamela Samuelson noted in a letter quoted by in the decision,

A federal district court in New York today issued a long-awaited ruling in the Google Books case, Authors Guild v. Google, rejecting the proposed settlement between the parties.

EFF participated in the case as counsel to a collection of authors and publishers, including Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem and Cory Doctorow, who objected to the settlement based on concerns about reader privacy. EFF worked with the ACLU and the Samuelson Clinic at University of California at Berkeley on the objection.